Apple’s HEVC has been there for a while now that got integrated in the Mac OS earlier & later iPhones also got the support in iOS 11. If you’re not aware of the HEVC, then it’s basically the H.265 Video Compression format that was able to shrink the video sizes upto 40%. And it turned out to work pretty well lately. Now Firefox wants to push the limits even further with their AV1 Video Compression as it has been claimed to be around 25-35% more efficient over the VP9 and H.265/HEVC compression formats. This means a higher compression rate while keeping similar (if not better) quality of a video.

Now, you need the latest version of Firefox Nightly to test this thing out as currently no other browser has support for AV1. Even if you try to open an AV1 video in your regular browser, this is what you’ll see…

By the way if you watch it on Firefox Nightly though, you be able to play the video. Basically because Firefox is doing this completely through the software & as you may already know, even the newly announced CPUs don’t have any clue of this new compression format. But, it’s not working properly right now. For example, this was the highest resolution that we were able to play the sample video without any issues.

After we were crossing the horizontal 1280 resolution mark & jumping to 1920, the video was getting stuck at a frame, then play for a split second after some time, then stuck again and this keeps on going. And the AV1 hasn’t been even finalized yet as well. But, if Mozilla & Bitmovin who are developing the whole AV1 thing, can make this happen, the users will get hugely benefited.

Specially those running Android will probably want to use the AV1. As everything is happening in the software, this’ll create comparatively less load on the CPU & that’ll translate to a much lesser Battery consumption. So, just after Mozilla implemented the Wide-color Gamut Support in their Firefox For Android, the AV1 Compression might be the next big thing for them.

By the way, if you want to try this right now then,

First download Firefox Nightly from the links depending on your device & OS

We have only tested on Windows 10 so, we cannot confirm if the Android version has received the same already but, it’ll probably work on Android as well. So, Mozilla is definitely trying to do some interesting things in their Browser which makes us really exited for the future implementations. Maybe, every other Browser Maker should try some innovations as well & help to shape a completely different but easier browsing experience for the end user.